Handheld consoles are the best part of games, I reckon. I love them more than any other aspect of this brilliant and difficult medium. Handhelds take games and set them free. They task you with finding new ways to fit them into your life, your days, your tangled journey through the world. The Switch is Mario on the sofa or sat up in bed, sure, but it’s also Mario under a tree in the park, in a window seat on the bus or a train as forests strobe past. It’s Mario queueing for an ice cream or waiting for an MRI. It’s Mario slung in your backpack: where next?
Freedom to roam! And there’s a peculiar freedom of form too. Handhelds are allowed to be odd, because they’re objects – clue in the name here I guess – to be held in the hands, and the hands are curious things themselves. Just look at them. Maybe this is why handhelds are where normally sober hardware designers deploy rear touchscreens, or two screens and a hinge and stylus, where a cartridge might come with its own little rumble pack, or a light sensor for weaponising the sun as you fight digital vampires. The Playdate, which I’ve spent the last fortnight with, features a crank! It features a
And yet. Long before Playdate and its crank arrived, some part of me already understood that every handheld is, before anything else, a puzzle to be solved. A lovely, playful, speculative puzzle. What is this funny new thing particularly good at? What makes it singular? Where does it really come alive? What, ultimately, is its intention? All this. Yet what I didn’t understand until Playdate is that solving this puzzle can take weeks – can be, in fact, something of a game in itself.
Sometimes, design provides the perfect analogy. Playdate, on the surface at least, is a deeply nostalgic machine – an oddball handheld made by a team who genuinely understand this crucial thing: that all handhelds are at least a little oddball in the first place. And a part of that nostalgia is down to the screen, which is monochrome and unlit and instead requires reflected light in order to display anything. There is a serious lineage to this kind of screen. A Nintendo lineage. And so I prop myself by a window, the sun illuminates the cheerful little device in front of me and I remember, for the first time in years, propping myself by another window in a bedsit somewhere to illuminate Advance Wars on the Game Boy Advance.
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But that analogy I was getting to: Playdate is a far more complicated object than I initially thought it to be – a far more complicated proposition. There is nostalgia here: a handful of games dutifully offer spins on Zelda, on the scrolling platformer, on Breakout. These games are great, actually. But the more I play, the more that stuff feels like a path that leads away from what’s really interesting. There is a far more fascinating device in here – an experience that, at its best, can be almost alien in its weirdness, or that reaches back to…? I don’t get to see it all the time. Like that magical, nostalgic, reflective screen, I have to angle things just so. And then suddenly it reveals itself.